Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Spunky the burro, with his mother Hunky, is tormented by a horsefly that will not leave him alone. The fly bites, buzzes round his ears, lands where he cannot reach and dodges every kick, swat and snap; Spunky's attempts to get rid of it wreck the barnyard, bring down the washing and land him in the water trough, and the fly, drawn as a small, grinning pest with a voice, gets the better of him each time. The title is the moral: a horsefly cannot be shod, or dealt with, by force. Hunky, as usual, watches with patience until the little burro has worn himself out, and the fly departs on its own terms, or is finally outwitted, in the last minute. Documentation of the film beyond the series filmography is thin, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon as it survives.
Why It Matters
- It is the sixth of the seven Hunky and Spunky cartoons and the thirty-fifth of the thirty-six Color Classics, made in the Fleischers' last full year before Paramount took the studio; Myron Waldman's burros are drawn with the same softness as his Pudgy, and the fly is a cousin of the one Betty Boop fought in Swat the Fly five years earlier.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, on Film Superlist's roster of unrenewed Color Classics, and no renewal appears for it in the Catalog of Copyright Entries; it is one of the lesser-seen Spunky films, overshadowed by the Oscar-nominated original.
Notes and Trivia
- Pinto Colvig, Disney's Goofy, voices in the film during one of his spells away from Disney.
- The series ended a year later with Vitamin Hay.
- See also: Hunky and Spunky (1938), The Barnyard Brat (1939), Vitamin Hay (1941).